The financial services industry is exceedingly competitive. Banks, savings and loan institutions, trust companies, title companies, credit card companies and others are continually seeking ways to attract and maintain customers and to effectively market various financial services.
Conventionally these types of institutions utilize various tools and incentives for this purpose. These incentives may be in the form of rewards credited to the customer based on usage of services and purchases which may be redeemed for goods and services. Banks and other financial institutions often will offer a menu of free or reduced costs services to customers and will use free gifts as incentives to attract and maintain customers.
It is estimated there are approximately 1.8 million non-profit organizations in the U.S. including religious organizations. Generally, these non-profit organizations must rely on charitable contributions and various fund-raising activities in order to support their activities. Most individuals have one or more charitable organization, religious organization or cause which they support and to which they occasionally or regularly donate. Donations are made to financially support the activities of the selected organization and also because of inherent personal satisfaction individuals obtain from supporting a cause the individual believes is worthwhile.
There are various prior art programs for directing donations to a charity when purchases are made at participating merchants. U.S. Publication No. 2002/0008146 describes a universal charity card system which identifies a customer-benefactor and a charity by coded information. A merchant computer system reads the universal charity card's coded information and computes a charitable contribution as a percent of sales to the customer benefactor and stores the information in a merchant database. A central computer system pre-stores the merchant's bank electronic funds transfer identification, charity bank electronic funds identification and links to the merchant computer for the purpose of downloading the merchant database and initiates a debit electronic fund transfer to the merchant's bank or an amount equal to the charitable contribution and a credit electronic fund transfer to the charity's bank or an amount equal to the charitable contribution.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,555,497 and 5,546,303 both relate to vending machine systems in which a multiplicity of charitable collection stages are provided with selections for choosing the charity to which the contribution is to be made. The central station communicates with the individual charitable institutions to provide information as to monies collected and signals the machines as to premiums available to the donor.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,466,919 describes a system which enables a credit card cardholder to make a donation to a cardholder's selected charity at any time the cardholder makes a purchase using the credit card. The method comprises a credit/charge card which identifies on its magnetic strip charities to receive a donation in a bank expedited system which processes the card user's purchase transaction, pay a previously decided amount to the charity or charities and also bills the cardholder. In this system, the donated amounts may be paid by the bank or card issuing organization when the cardholder may add an amount which he/she pays to a selected charity. The system is described as a bank expedited charity donation.
U.S. Publication No. 2003/0167177 relates to an incentive-based loyalty program in which portions of sales receipts are credited to a designated charity. The system includes the steps of enrolling at least one member; receiving a designation of at least one charitable organization from the member, the member being unrestricted as to which charitable organization is designated. A portion of the proceeds from a financial transaction are credited to a designated charitable organization.
While there are various systems such as those described above and other systems for expediting and facilitating donations to charitable organizations, there nevertheless exists the need for a system which will (1) provide necessary funding to charitable organizations; (2) provide a simple and convenient means for an individual to direct funds to a selected charity or charities without any additional costs to the individual and (3) provide marketing benefits to participating financial institutions.